Portrait of Dr. Francisco de Pisa

El Greco painted this near the end of his life, around 1610, in Toledo, the Spanish city where he'd settled decades earlier after leaving Italy. The sitter is Francisco de Pisa, a Toledo priest and the city's official historian, then in his seventies. Pisa was planning to endow a local convent, and a portrait of him, almost certainly this one, hung there within a few years, recorded in the convent's inventories after his death. El Greco was old by then too, but the portrait shows none of it slipping. The face is dry, alert and completely particular, the black clerical dress dissolving into a dark ground so that the head and the pale hand resting on the book carry the whole picture.